Posts by Fletch

"There's been no such announcement"

Yeah, that's not a denial.

At this point, it's either completely true or (more likely) partly true. Microsoft's PR team is one of the quickest in the industry. They've got press releases out within hours when zero-day exploits come out or 360 shipments are confirmed as damaged. Silence means something is up.

Played the demo a lot at work during game time. It was pretty fun (go go giant red laser of death from the sky!!), but then TF2 came out and that's our new flavor.

I actually thought the demo was okay. It has a simple gameplay promise and it keeps it. The in-your-face combat stuff was pretty fun, but that was about it. I'm not so sure it will see any significant numbers in the market though.

Ahhhh, rocked as the Pyro tonight, which I'm so happy about. I was always Sniper or Pyro in TFC, and I've just felt lost without having a good Pyro in TF2. We played some gravelpit tonight, and there were 8 guys standing on a cap point (we were just letting them have it). I snuck in, lit them all on fire, and ran around like a maniac to avoid fire. They still capped the point, but 5 of them dropped dead right afterwards. Good times.

Master Cheif Dies

Professional Recruitment is reserved for companies offering actual jobs, not internet contracting for assets. This will stay in the Mod Recruitment forum.

On a side note: quit being dicks.

I love love love love love love sudden death. On the surface it's great because it allows the casual audience to enjoy the game more, but for the more adept players, it's a chance to show just how much of a badass you are. It forces you to play your class perfectly, because if you screw around, you die. We had a round this afternoon where I was stuck as pyro for sudden death in 2fort. I knew I wasn't going to do much in a straight firefight, so I went down to our basement and waited to ambush any spies or scouts coming through, and I ended up getting 2 of 'em. The round ended up with a rag-tag group of me as a pyro, an HW, and a medic sneaking into their base and taking out an HW, and engineer and his turret, and a sniper. If any of us had tried to do that alone, we would have been smoked. But we played our classes correctly, played as a team, and picked them, off one by one.

This has turned into one of those games that everybody in our office plays eagerly during gametime and then spends the next half hour sharing their best stories, a lot of them having to do with sudden death. Today all of the dead people very screaming (you could hear them down the hall), because Kami was a spy and hiding with the two surviving medics from the other team as they healed him up to max power before he backstabbed both of them. The shouts of "STOP HEALING HIM! HE'S A SPY!!" were glorious.

Quote from ginger_lord

FF != TFC or TFC:S

But that's what people wanted. So they're going to feel disappointed when they didn't get it. Not saying it's fair. It's just life.

I played it a bit this week and my overall feeling was "meh-to-positive." Lag was an issue (whether that is from people using shitty servers or the code base itself, who knows). Classes seemed unbalanced. It basically turned into medics, snipers, and soldiers. Some of the maps looked great, while others had some areas that looked rushed. My main criticism in that area is there isn't an overall cohesiveness to them as a set (some are very old-school arenas, others try a more real world approach). Gameplay was fun, but there were some times I felt the game couldn't decide about realism vs. arcade gameplay. Rocket jumping = okay, but then I got fall damage jumping off mid-sized ledges, etc. Of course, it's a first release, so I wasn't expecting a supreme amount of polish in all areas. You get that through watching the community play and then making changes as you need to.Hopefully the FF team will keep iterating with timely updates.

For the negatives, which are glaring, but not show-stoppers, it's still the best HL2 MP mod out there. Good job, FF team.

Quote from Section_Ei8ht

IMHO, open source works great for workstation and everyday apps (I use FOS programs for everyday apps because its gives me a sort of guarantee that it is not spyware/bloatware), but I don't think it could work for entire video games.

Extremely good point. A lot of it comes from the fact that the FOS community is coder driven. When you're a coder working for some academic institution or engineering company and you need a small widget or app for your work, you can usually combine efforts with similar coders and create a FOS solution for a communal problem, usually for a small-scale community. That's the primate reason FOS works. The target community is usually also contributing community. FOS games don't share that efficiency as their target is dmuch wider than their contributing source.

Dear god I was skinny as hell back then (i was the one in the orange shirt).

P.S. That was me driving. I'm happy that I didn't kill Mikey.

FOS game development suffers from two primary problems: 1) ego and 2) audience.

When I say ego, I'm not saying it in a bad way. But the truth is developers have egos. Artists take pride in their work, and talented artists and designers are a premium, so they the good ones aren't going to just hand everything away. The lower ones will, but then you get a lower quality end result.

Audience is the second problem. There simply isn't a large audience. The most plays FOS games are played less than a lot of mods. You have to go our of your way to find them or know about them. Mods have an inherent tie to a commercial game's pre-built mindshare.

I'm not ragging on FOS games. They're just an extremely small niche, more popular with coders than artists and players.

And then TF2 totally cock blocks you on monday.

Congrats to the team for getting it out.

We've been playing during gametime the last two days. Some things of note:

1) Once an objective gets taken, the defending team is really screwed to get into position fast enough to guard the next one.

2) 2 or 3 people working with coordination on offense can wreck the defensive team pretty easily (Mikey, myself, and another guy were able to blow the underground gate, hack the tower, and blow up the last thing without the defensive team knowing what the hell happened).

3) Those flying strogg things are pretty fun. I always play human, so I merely enjoy sniping those bastards out of the sky... speaking of which...

4) The human sniper rifle is hugely unbalanced. I had to stop playing as a sniper because people were getting pissy. Serves them right for running in a straight line.

5) It's fun, but I see it getting old fast. I'm moving to TF2 next week.

100% Texan

It's called football. We invented it. We name it.

And the Pats are going to win (so says my fantasy team that relies on their receivers).

I'm getting the 8GB touch. I had a 10GB forever and never really had a problem not having the stuff I wanted to listen to (of course I manage my library on a fairly regular basis).

I've still got my 40gb for massive storage

After the Shack news update, I surfed around and dug up some more about this. Basically this is what happened. It was a family computer and the dad had the admin account. Everybody else had private accounts with all the XP privacy settings turned on, meaning that if you installed software, it only installed for your user (unless you were the admin), and you can't access things installed on other user's parts of the harddrive. One kid installed Bioshock and the other wanted to play, but couldn't access. Secrumrom got fucked up because it said it was already installed on the computer (so says the registry), but the kid couldn't access it.

So its partially the dad's fault for the uber-privacy setup on the computer, partially the kids fault for installing it on his account and not getting teh dad to install it on the master account, and partially securerom's fault for an obscure design defect.

But because the internet is a bunch of fucked up idiots with too much free time, it's 2K's fault. Go figure.

In the long run, none of this matters. The five install limit is annoying, but nobody bothered to ask why they hell somebody had installed a game more than 5 times in less than 2 days. The widescreen issue is just fucking dumb. It's the default behavior for UE3, and nobody noticed or cared about it on R6:Vegas, so that says something there. Critical people will find reasons to be critical, and the gaming "media" will continue to fuel it because they want more diggs. End of story.

Children of Men

Quote from KungFuSquirrel

I don't think it's any harder or easier to learn UE3 than any other engine on the market right now. I'd say it's much easier than past Unreal iterations; I was up and running on production work almost immediately with only minimal unreal knowledge when I started here at Gearbox, and save for bsp being a bit slow it didn't take long for everything to become really natural.

Agreed. I was up and running within a week or two. Most of it is just figuring out the shortcuts and setup. However, I will say that if you want a really easy path to a job in the industry, learn UE3. All signs seem to be that this current tech generation is going to be extended because Sony and MS want a return on their investment, which means knowing UE3 will give you market level skills for 5 years. The level designer market is really dry right now, so anybody with any talent is going to get looked at. Anybody with talent and UE3 experience is gold.